Hong Ra-hee
Source of wealth: Samsung
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Modules
Biography
Hong Ra-hee is the widow of Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee, who had long been South Korea's richest person before his death in 2020.
She was the director of the Samsung Museum of Art, known as Leeum, and the Ho-Am Art Museum before her resignation in 2017.
Hong is an arts graduate of Seoul National University, and both museums contain collections from her father-in-law, Samsung founder Lee Byung-Chull.
Her father was chairman of one of Korea's largest daily newspapers, JoongAng Ilbo, which is now run by her nephew.
One of her brothers, Hong Seok-joh, is the chairman of Korea's biggest convenience-store chain.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Hong Ra-hee
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Hong Ra-hee, linked to Technology and 'Samsung', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 83 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 5.2 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.